Atari's Immortal Legacy

Cover Story: Though its time in the limelight is long over, the 2600 left an indelible mark on the game industry and gaming culture.

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indsight has a way of making landmark designs seem inevitable. We look at the Atari 2600, and it seems to tick all of the "console" checkmarks like interchangeable cartridges, replaceable controllers, and a slick appearance. Yet it's easy to lose sight of the fact that no system had ever done all these things at once before. The minds behind the 2600 didn't know what they were doing would define a multi-billion-dollar industry for decades to come. They didn't even know if it would survive on store shelves past its first Christmas.

It wasn't even called the 2600, originally. Its initial christening was as the Atari Video Computer System (VCS), a Trojan Horse of a name designed to make parents think it might be good for more than playing games (and to steal attention from the recent release of the VCR). The system's aesthetics followed suit: Black with metal switches, radiator-like fins, and a wood veneer that made it seem more like a piece of high-end electronics than previous, more toy-like home game systems. A later revision of the system would abandon the wood veneer for solid matte black throughout, and a third revision (the 2600 Jr) reduced its size, traded the matte finish for a glossy one, and added chrome accents and aggressive angles.

Eight years later, Nintendo would use the same techniques to launch their 8-bit Famicom in the United States as the "Nintendo Entertainment System," with aesthetics that screamed "1980s" as loudly as the 2600's screamed "1970s." Since then, it's been virtually mandatory that new consoles look as modern and high-tech on the outside as their interiors suggested, and the few exceptions (like the Nintendo GameCube) have enjoyed distinctly less success than their contemporaries.

While Nintendo differentiated its NES from Atari's 2600 via aesthetics, other post-2600 consoles doubled down on the "solid black" look. Sony has taken a great deal of their inspiration for console design from the 2600, leveraging the radiator-fin look in the cantilevered case of both the PlayStation 2 and PS2 slim as well as in the ridges on the lid of the brand-new PS3 hardware revision announced at TGS 2012. Microsoft has been steadily inching the Xbox 360 closer to the 2600 Jr look, starting with chrome accents and growing blacker and glossier with each new release.

Of course, it would be a mistake to attribute the 2600's success solely to looks. Its key innovation, and the element that came to define what a game console truly is, was its ability to play games off of cartridges. Earlier home video game hardware was hard-wired for exactly one game, or if you were lucky, a handful of rule variants that could be set by DIP switches. The 2600 was the first system to use a microprocessor to run whatever software was plugged into it. This started off as a cynical ploy to set a lower price for the console itself and make money selling each Pong variant separately, but as time went on, Atari's engineers started stretching the hardware's capabilities to create complicated and dynamic experiences beyond what anyone had in mind when creating the box in 1977. What started out as a sales gimmick single-handedly created the modern model of game development, where creators are free to focus on the design of a game and don't have to worry about engineering their ideas into custom hardware as frugally as possible.

To this day, game developers are drawing on ideas first explored by 2600 games. While ubiquitous support for four-player multiplayer on consoles is a relatively recent event -- Sony didn't support four controllers out-of-the-box until the 2006 release of the PS3 -- gamers have been challenging up to three friends at once since Warlords thanks to a quirk of the 2600 paddle controller allowing two controllers to be plugged into each controller port. The titans of console add-on controllers, the light gun and racing wheel, also got their starts with the 2600.

Whether they used custom controllers or not, designers had to keep their controls simple to work with the one-button-and-a-joystick nature of the console's input ports. That simplicity drove a sort of mechanical purity to 2600's games that gave them all broad appeal and accessibility. While later consoles moved toward ever-more-complicated controls to facilitate more complex game designs, the rise of touchscreen computing devices has led to something of a renaissance for simple game controls. Titles like Super Crate Box and Super Hexagon feature 2600-style gameplay with the benefit of 35 years of design refinement and technology advances behind them, and they're making a tidy profit on the iOS app store by recapturing that old game design magic.

Not all of the experiments Atari tried were tied to gameplay design. Some were tied to marketing and presentation. Superman showed that games could play a role in multimedia franchises, while Pitfall showed that you didn't necessarily have to get a license holder on-board to create an experience that struck exactly the same pop-culture chord that a movie with Harrison Ford and a whip did. Today, games are at the forefront of those multimedia franchises, rather than merely contributing to them, and developers like Naughty Dog and Crystal Dynamics are continuing
to prove that you don't need LucasArts' approval to make a great Indiana Jones game.

Unfortunately, while the movie/game connection could be a profitable one, success was far from guaranteed. Atari spent an unheard-of $125 million rushing E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial through development to capitalize on the movie's success for the 1982 holiday season. It blew up in their faces, with Atari losing over $100 million on the project, leaving millions of unsold copies on store shelves, and contributing to the North American gaming industry crash of 1983.

In its death throes, the Atari 2600 managed to create another beloved gaming tradition. In 1983, as the video game industry cratered, unlucky retailers who had invested in stocking thousands upon thousands of game cartridges found themselves sitting on a product nobody wanted. So they did what any business does when they find themselves sitting on worthless merchandise: They dumped them into a bin in the middle of the store, selling them for pennies on the dollar.

What was a disaster for toy stores (and utter financial ruination for Atari) was a boon for gamers. They could suddenly afford to try out any number of games they wouldn't have considered otherwise. While many of them weren't very good at all, the new pricing scheme meant a lousy game was a momentary inconvenience rather than an expensive mistake, and the mass consumption of games turned kids into lifelong gamers -- and their kids, once they found their parents' old library of Atari games in the basement, after them.

Today, companies have figured out how to harness that pricing scheme without utter financial collapse as a prerequisite. Apple is turning kids into gamers with 99-cent app store titles for the iPod Touch. Valve's crazy summer and winter sales have PC gamers buying games they'd never considered, and often never heard of, faster than they can play them. And Indie Bundles are making hundreds of thousands of dollars for both worthy charities and the rapidly-growing community of independent game developers.

Even the independent game development movement can trace its roots to the Atari 2600. The story is practically gaming folklore at this point. Atari refused to publicly credit game developers for their work, leading to the invention of video game Easter eggs in the game Adventure and, later, to four disgruntled Atari employees quitting their jobs at Atari and founding the first third-party video game developer: Activision. Ironically, Activision (now the world's largest video game publisher) settled a lawsuit earlier this year involving allegations of failing to properly compensate game creators for their work, resulting in those creators quitting their job at an Activision subsidiary to start their own studio.

It's difficult to imagine what gaming would look like today without the influence of the 2600. The way games are made, distributed, and played throughout the world all trace directly back to decisions made at Atari in the late '70s. Would third-party development still exist? Would M&Ms refusal of product placement be the dumbest business decision associated with the movie ET? Would Yar have gotten its revenge? We may never know.

Alex Androski

Alex Androski is an Industrial Designer by trade. That means he knows better than to expect the PlayStation 4 to feature fake wood-veneer accents, but that's not going to stop him from getting his hopes up.

Comments (8)

Few will know like we know =)

Haha it's humorous to me how my novel of a comment posted on one of the other Atari articles, "A Stella Anniversary: 35 Years of Atari 2600", pretty much ties in to everything in this one, except from a different perspective of course. Oh, especially about E.T. =P

e.t. was great

e.t. was great considering that most atari games sucked i wasen't a true gamer untill i played nes i actually played this game and beat it several times i even created my own trick which not many people know of where you can glitch the game by trapping elliot in this circle thats suppose to pick up e.t. i use to play the game just to see how many times i could pull off the glitch it wasen't easy but when i did it it made this 7 year old at the time happy e.t. should get more credit i was shocked when i got older and found out what they did with all those cartridges and how much people hated this game i just didnt get it i can understand now days pitting one game against another but not back than some games were better than others but in my eyes they all sucked and e.t. to me was just as good as playing pitfall thank god the nes saved us all from atari hell!